Jews have always been adept at organizing communities clustering around a shul or minyan wherever the vagaries of history propel them. But simply throwing people together into the same geographic area or uniting the men for minyanim isn’t enough to make the inhabitants feel the sort of achdus or unity that turns a geographic “house” into a “home.” Ideally we’d like to create community ties that bind neighbors into a surrogate family.

When it comes to families it’s usually the women who maintain family ties and knit the clan together. Likewise in a community it’s often female initiative that draws people together organizes children’s activities and provides for community needs. How do you rally the women of a community together to make it more solid?  How do you get the ladies to turn out for events meet each other and help each other particularly when your haphazard group of neighbors may be very different from each other?

At a time where achdus has become an ever more pressing issue Family First turned to a few seasoned hands at community-building to learn how we can unite our own neighborhood.

First Furrows

When a tiny community is just getting off the ground every person counts. Suri Handelsman is well acquainted with such situations: when she first moved to Waterbury Connecticut some ten years ago there was only one small yeshivah 40 bochurim and 11 families in place.

“My husband and I came after spending a year in Eretz Yisrael and that year another five or six couples came as well” Suri recalls. “Almost right away I got a call: could you be the nursery teacher? But I said no; I’d already accepted a job teaching in a high school in New Haven. It felt like a fine line to tread — I wanted to be part of my new community but I didn’t want to be completely swallowed by it either.”

But the newness of the community meant that any fresh arrival would be seized upon to lend a hand. A N’shei group had already been set up headed by Waterbury pioneer Daniella Thaler. “In the beginning” Daniella explains “it’s not about ‘what can I join?’ It’s about ‘What can I start?’ ” 

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